Psychosis, Spirit Possession and Child Sexual Abuse
A Jungian, Depth and Liberation Psychology Perspective.
Autumn, 2024
This text describes how child victims of sexual violence may manifest symptoms that are named psychosis or spirit possession, depending upon the worldview of the practitioner interpreting the symptoms. But these symptoms and behaviours often represent normal responses to the overwhelming psychic pressure of childhood abuse and when mis-diagnosed, victims are not effectively treated which leaves their suffering to worsen throughout the lifespan. This perpetuates an intergenerational cycle of mental illness impacting family members, communities and cultures for decades.
Drawing from Carl Jung, Franz Fanon, and other scholars of the Depth and Liberation psychologies, this text centres on ten case studies whose stories unfold across Toronto and the Caribbean and Latin American region. The analysis accompanying each case however describes universal themes such as bystander mobilization, victims turned perpetrators, Archetypal and Indigenous psychologies, child trafficking, the rise of the dark feminine, and how a pedagogy of medical psychology has developed in the last hundred years, in this region.
This presentation offers points of view of both victims and perpetrators, and describes how caregivers, educators, medical practitioners, legal and policy-making personnel, and institutions as a whole may take more insightful, preventive action to protect and heal victims of gendered violence.
Keywords: Psychosis, Possession, Sexual Abuse, Children, Victims, Perpetrators, Gendered Violence, Mis-Diagnosis, Indigenous, Transcendence, Jung, Fanon, Archetypal Psychology.